10/03/2009

Journal Penetration on the Web

I'm going to start an unscientific study to see if scholarly genealogical journals are being read and the information is being transmitted on the Internet. I'm going to pick random articles on 17th century people and see what happens when you run a basic Google search on those people. The first example is the article:

“William Varney of Ipswich and Gloucester, Massachusetts” by Kathleen C. Barber and Janet Ireland Delorey, TAG 81 (2006):161-171, 316-321. Although bearing a 2006 date, this journal has been behind and the article likely was published in 2007. Running a Google search on "William Varney" "Bridget Deverell" you get four hits, one of which is my old web page. Search "William Varney" Bridget Ipswich and you get 737 hits, the second of which incorrectly notes Bridget as Bridget Knight. Running that search, "William Varney" "Bridget Knight" and you get 284 hits. So 284 wrong and 4 right. Not good news.

Last example: "Ancestry of Bennet Eliot of Nazeing, Essex, Father of the Seven Great Migration Immigrants to Massachusetts" by William Wyman Fiske, NEHGR 161:85-91, 186-98, 250-59, 162:65-72, 128-39. A search for "Simon Eliot" "Katherine Haynes" yields only 82 hits whereas "Bennet Eliot" "Lettice Alger" yields 10, but Google suggests "Bennett Eliot""Lettice Alger" for 365 hits. So assuming overlap only 82 websites have Bennet's parents out of 365 (22%). Still not good news.

I'll be trying more examples from the 1990s which may indicate that time and word-of-mouth play a crucial part. However, it does seem there is a definitive gap between the good information in print and that on the Internet.